Burrowowl

Five basic laws on human stupidity; we all knew that there are a lot of stupid folks out there, and sometimes we even think that we aren’t amongst that hallowed demographic. Unfortunately, as the First Basic Law states, “Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.” Take at look at Carlo M. Cipolla’s The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity for a good look at the frequency, distribution, and a simple taxonomy of people being dumb.

Earlier this week, Microsoft made a significant update available to their legions of certified engineers and technicians. Go turn on Automatic Updates so you can take advantage of the new features. It isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, but for the first time, Microsoft is making a significant push for security on their Windows Operating System. It’s long overdue, and nobody really believes that the new firewall won’t have more holes than a Swiss cheese factory, but it’s a big step in the right direction. The service pack weighs in at over 266MB so it’ll require a little patience.

After much waiting, tearing of cloth, and gnashing of teeth, Privateer Press really did manage to get the IKCG written, printed, shipped, and into my happy little hands. This was a couple of weeks ago now, and I’ve had some time to thumb through everything two or three times, so here we go:

First off, it’s huge. While the artwork is excellent, it doesn’t pad out the book as much as one might expect. There really is 400 pages worth of material in there. Secondly, it is chock-full of Iron Kingdoms. If you aren’t familiar with the Iron Kingdoms, it is a “Full Metal Fantasy” setting, by which it is meant that the setting combines an era of technological innovation and arcane development that are progressing hand-in-hand. This means 400 pages of flavor, a handful of new classes including the Bodger, Gunmage, and Arcane Mechanik, and lots and lots and lots of new rules that further bolster the flavor of the setting.
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We’ve all received spam at some point. UBE is a plague afflicting the backbone of the Internet these days, and many folks have taken to such extreme measures as blacklisting, filtering, and reinventing DNS. Each of these approaches fail to address the real spam problem, which is that it is annoying and a total waste of resources.

To inject some levity into the situation, Chunkbot has been collecting interesting spam subjects for months now on his site, but somebody has one-upped him, creating little single-frame cartoons based upon spam he has received. Check out spamusement.com for some laughs. The author has even provided a RSS feed to keep everybody up-to-date.

My buddy Chunkbot notified me of what may well be the greatest potential innovation in personal electronics since Apple effectively hijacked the idea of the Rio MP3 Player. Apple was able to pull of this coup by combining an existing idea and slapping it into a new form factor, backed by a massive marketing campaign and a grassroots of thousands of rabid Apple partisans. Using the same principles, the iPod may be on its way out. It is my suggestion that somebody with the financial clout immediately take This idea and run with it. I’ll be right there in line to purchase a Soundwave the Decepticon MP3 player, and at least two transforming “cassettes” to accompany it as soon as you bring it to market.